script to check for os libraries on RedHat 5.x and 6.x

Question

We ship ImageMagick with our product. It needs quite a few libraries.

libtiff libICE libdl
libfreetype libX11 libglib-2.0
libjpeg libbz2 libxml2
libpng librsvg-2 libz
libfontconfig libgdk_pixbuf-2.0 libm
libXext libm libgomp
libXt libgobject-.0 libpthread
libSM libgmodule-2.0 

Is there a standard way to check if these libraries are already present on the host RedHat operating system?

Searching on the SO and google lead to commands like

pkg-config, locate and which

Has anybody successfully used them?

Answer 1

Try the ldd command:

ldd ImageMagick

prints out the dynamic, shared object, libraries that the ImageMagick program references and whether or not the libraries were found.

Answer 2

you can just use yum to install and it will show the missing dependencies.

if you just want to know what is missing, you can install yum-downloadonly plugin, then you can

yum install -y ImageMagick --downloadonly

this will just download all the missing dependencies without installing them.

to find dependencies before you install an rpm

rpm -qpR something.rpm

will list all the dependecies, and you can then search to see if these exist, but that sounds too complicated. probably yum --downloadonly will be enough.

Answer 3

I suggest you use autoconf; there are tools inside which will automatically check for libraries that exist, by attempting to compile a dummy program against the library. http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/ An example:

AC_CHECK_LIB(MagickWand, GetMagickModule)

This would attempt to compile a simple program that would call GetMagickModule() - it does not attempt to run the program, only to compile it.

The autoconf program generates a configure program that would be called to check for the libraries. It's primary purpose is to eventually generate a Makefile, but that doesn't have to be its goal; the configure program could just check for libraries and return an error if they do not exist.